Dante Dicioccio is a practical guy. So it’s no surprise that he is moving out of his four-bedroom ranch house on Green Valley Drive in Parma [Ohio] and relocating to a two-bedroom apartment. Dicioccio said he’s growing older and the house is too big. Cleaning the house and keeping up with the yard work is too much trouble. “When you get older, it’s hard to do the stuff you did when you were younger,” Dicioccio said. “And you want to spend more time in leisure – golfing and happy hour!”

As part of the moving process, Dicioccio hosted a garage sale last week. He wanted to divest himself of the yard tools, furniture, camping gear and Christmas decorations that had accumulated in his house and garage. “Going through the baby clothes brought tears to my eyes. Some things I couldn’t part with, even though my oldest is twenty-one.”

Dicioccio’s front lawn was one of many in Parma last week with a garage-sale or yard-sale sign. It’s simply that time of year. Despite a steady, misty rain, Dicioccio’s garage sale drew customers – about twenty in the first half-hour. They were the hardcore garage-sale shoppers. “One lady was looking for buttons and a gentleman was looking for picture frames for his paintings,” Dicioccio said. Another man was searching for watches and old radios. “Some people are looking for stuff for their kids for college, for their dorms or apartments,” Dicioccio said.

On Lanyard Drive, Arlene Berish was having a sale for three houses – hers and those of family members. “We accumulate a lot of stuff,” Berish said. “We buy things at auctions and we have stuff from when our kids were growing up.” Berish was selling unused greeting cards, Christmas and Halloween decorations, toy cars and train sets. Her husband Jim displayed some of his old garden tools. “We were very disappointed with the rain today,” Berish said. “We sold things but if the weather would have cooperated we would have done a lot better.”

One of the most interesting items in Berish’s sale was a bust of Johann Sebastian Bach. It used to hang necklaces. The Bach bust wasn’t exactly carved out of stone. It was on sale for $5. “You buy things and you don’t use them much,” Berish said.